Site Mobile Navigation

Sentence of the Week, Hilarrifying Edition

A. When Quintana got chicken pox, she told her parents coldly, “I just noticed I have cancer.” (Boris Kachka’s profile of Joan Didion)

This is hilarious but also terrifying — i.e., hilarrifying. The casual matter-of-factness about such a grave subject; the magnitude of the misdiagnosis; the apparently adult depth of the child’s psychology. One hundred percent hilarrifying.

I’ll admit, I haven’t spent too much time thinking about the emotional consequences of remote-control design. But it’s true: those buttons are too hard, and it is somehow sad. And then all of those unnecessary colors: it’s like they’re trying to distract us from the buttons’ unsettling stiffness by burying us in rainbows and cotton candy. It’s infantilizing. And, of course, hilarrifying.
C. Given the choice he had always felt he would rather not have children with genes that were 50 percent dachshund. (Helen Dewitt, “Lightning Rods”)

Reasonable. But also hilarrifying.

D. He blamed all manner of bogeymen — including the United States, operatives of Al Qaeda and youths “fueled by milk and Nescafé spiked with hallucinogenic drugs.” (Neil MacFarquhar’s epic Qaddafi obituary)

E. He also decided to rename the months. February was Lights. August was Hannibal. (ibid.)

Qaddafi is the very definition of hilarror (i.e., hilarious terror): horrific torture and violence and abuse of every kind — all of it perpetrated by a man who was completely absurd, a cartoon dictator. MacFarquhar’s obituary is a thorough attempt to map the intersections between those two extremes.

F. A goose instinctively heads south in a V-formation in a V formed of other geese instinctively heading south. (Helen Dewitt, “Lightning Rods”)

I just finished reading Helen DeWitt’s new nove — her first in more than 10 years — and I’m very excited about it. It’s a short, strange, masterfully controlled experiment in tone: a satire written largely in business-world motivational cliches. It shouldn’t work, but it does. This sentence about geese is typically, fascinatingly flat.

G. The very sky that hung above it looked pale and extinct, giving the idea, not of darkness, but of light that had become dead. (Thomas Moore)

Nothing particularly hilarrifying here — it’s just beautiful. The key phrase is “become dead,” which is 100 times as powerful, in this context, than the simpler “died” would have been.

Our Sentence of the Week is the only one that wasn’t hilarrifying: Thomas Moore’s perfect description, written two centuries ago, of the sky outside my window at this moment: “The very sky that hung above it looked pale and extinct, giving the idea, not of darkness, but of light that had become dead.”

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…